Tag Archives: E-Meter

Secrets are the mortar,
binding lies like bricks together,
into prisons for the mind.

animated e-meter image (c) ethercat

C O N F I D E N T I A L

In 1971 I was in Scientology, working for them in Los Angeles. Because of my technical background and that I had been a bench technician and service manager for Myer-Emco HiFi on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington DC, the #1 hi-fi store in DC, I was asked to goto the company that produced Scientology’s E-meters, named Delta Meter Service run by Tom and Jaye Paige I think Tory Christman was a receptionist there. (pardon spellings).

My mission was to determine why the devices, E-meters, were not getting produced, and get the backlog of several hundred filled.

In the course of this I was shown some confidential “Board Technical Bulletins” “BTBs” issued by the corporate shell of Scientology in California.

Each one had C O N F I D E N T I A L across the top… I felt a little like James Bond…

The documents were taken out of a safe, that was under a workbench at the South end of the main E-Meter assembly room, at Delta Meter. on the corner at Beacon Street, PAC WUS was at 811 Beacon, and Celebrity Center was on the next cross street.(1) The BTB’s described the unusual specifications for the E-meter movement, which included how many times it was to swing back and forth once being turned on, to when the needle stopped moving. There was a time limit and number of swings. This specification is most unusual.

Author with E_Meter’s from the production run at Delta

An electrical guy wants a meter to measure a current. He wants the moving indicator to move to the proper value and not overshoot, and not waste his time waiting for it to stop swinging…so he can read the value it indicates.

As a child I used to fall asleep reading through the Lafayette Radio catalogue.. and dreamed of one day having a short wave radio. I had built a full-wave crystal radio and liked making sparks and arcs, and spent considerable time mesmerized by plasma arcs, using wall line voltage and a toaster as my ballast with carbon electrodes to strike the arc taken from the center pole of a D cell battery…I liked reading Popular Science and Radio TV Magazine, and built many of their projects. This was how I had ‘fun’ if I wasn’t riding my bike in Montrose Park in Georgetown across the street.

I was perhaps 12 at the time, and I saving my paper route money delivering Daily News in my neighborhood in Georgetown, to purchase a “Become a Radio Television Technician At Home” course. It was called the Progressive Radio Edu-kit, Edu-kit. After leaving scientology I started a an electronics business on my own, took a dozen or so college electronics courses, and decades later ended up doing electronics for some hi-tech hi-end clients like IDA, The Institute for Defense Analysis, Lynda Carter, Wonderwoman, and the Crown Prince of Iran’s mansion in Great Falls.. .

At the time, when I read these secret scientology documents, I did not know one twentieth of what I know now.

I do recall wondering to myself “Wow, what an odd specification for a meter needle movement..”

FOUR DECADES LATER

Four decades later, just a few weeks ago, something occurred to me, something I did not know enough about to even consider possible nor know enough to consider that possibility to be of any significance:

The E-Meter movement electrically is a normal moving-coil design, with a standard 100 micro amp full scale meter movement that used a taut band suspension, which is like a torsion bar suspension on an car.

The E-meter movement’s design specs call for a rather loose needle, with less than normal damping. The documents I viewed specified that when you turn it on with 90 uA the needle will move past the 90 uAmp position (Scientology calls this the “Set” position) and it will swing back and forth a certain number of times, settling upon the true reading within a certain amount of time in seconds.

The number of swings was 4 to 7, I believe. And it had to settle in 1, or 2 seconds. This is an enormous amount of time, for a device used to measure specific amounts of electrical current, compared to normal “volt-meters” or “amp-meters” or any thing with a moving needle where its final position is the data.

If I had purchased a movement for measuring current that worked this way I would send it back because it would take too long to see where the needle came to rest, to take my measurement.

THE STRANGE METER MOVEMENT

I apologize to any fans I have left that actually understand what I’m talking about that it took forty five years to connect these dots to try to describe the insight below

The E-Meter movement has a resonance frequency, which if stimulated, might make the needle appear to do something that Scientology calls the “Floating Needle”.

If that floating effect were created when a low enough brainwave frequency was applied to the resistance measurement function that is the wheatstone electrical bridge circuit that is basically an E-meter, then the Scientology E-meter might actually be a sophisticated detector of the hypnotic, suggestible, trance state. MORE on Hypnosis methods in Scientology HEREHERE and HERE

The needle would start to “Float” if exposed to a low frequency AC signal, at
near the resonance frequency of the needle itself on the spring of the taught band, and with the minimal magnetic damping at the resonance frequency for the needle…

And that frequency is same brainwave frequency associated with the state of TRANCE, created by hypnotism!!!

Stimulate an E-Meter with 5-7 cycles per second and the needle tip wanders around the dial with a “floating” aspect.

Byte Magazine’s Steve Ciarcia ran a column called “Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar” One of his articles was a plan for brain wave analyzer. I purchased the kit and put this gizmo together and made it work.

Below, this is my 9 channel brainwave analyzer that I built.

From playing with a “HAL-200” brain wave analyzer hooked to my hands with tin cans, I learned that brainwave frequencies were displayed on the device. Google Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar HAL 200 EEG.

When I used the analyzer above, I only used one channel and I used E-meter style soup cans, held in each hand. What I found was that the predominant brain wave entrainment was creating a detectable signal when only hands were used as the input! This proved to me that the predominant brainwave frequencies exist and are measurable at the hands…

I spent great deal of time playing with this, and used it as a bio-feedback device to train my mind to find answers to a question. The pattern I noted will be covered in another blog posting someday, but at the end of each inward seeking effort, the answer, was accompanied by a small frequency peak in one band of the upper part of the 2 to 20 Hz spectrum displayed, which would descend in frequency while growing in amplitude until it became huge, driving the display off scale at approximately 4-7 hz.. which also just happens to be the frequency of trance! Called “Delta Wave” frequency see chart above image of the HAL-4.

In other words the absolutely unique specifications for the E-meter movement itself, makes a simple wheatstone bridge into a TRANCE DETECTOR.. and this can be demonstrated in a court of law.

F/N = trance has been established* (Note4)

Which begs the question: Where in hell would I find someone that knows how to do this, today, much , much less back in the 1950’s? Volney Matheson, the designer of the first E-meter, who worked with Hubbard for a while before calling him out as a manipulating, conniving charlatan and con-man did not know this. Volney used off the shelf Simpson meters, which had ample damping.

These are dots that took me 45 years to connect.. L Ron Hubbard certainly did not figure this out, THAT is certain…. Boy, I sure would like to meet the man that thought this up. Wow… I am duly impressed.

The “End Phenomena” of a Scientology “Auditing Session”

The guys needle is “FLOATING”, the “Auditor” checks to see if he seems happy, now that trance has been detected they end off if he is smiling… then they get someone else to make sure that the trance is deep and stable enough, they call this clown “The Examiner who checks the guy is still entranced, deep enough in light trance, a more suggestible state, to get to the registrar’s interrogation chair, where he is asked for money by a person who has studied and practiced “Les Dane’s, Big League Sales and Closing Techniques”. He is told to write a check, (which get money out of his bank, his reactive mind, oops I mean his BANK), and when he walked in the door he was already convinced that: he needed to get rid of both!*

*Dianetics convinces people using various means of corecive persuasion, including covert hypnosis and repetition of suggestion, to cause you to believe that you have an evil “reactive mind” and that you have to get rid of this evil, any any cost, and that Hubbard’s “technology” can do this…he also calls the reactive mind by the term your “bank”, and you have to get rid of that too, which makes emptying your bank account far easier!!

EDIT: Star Magazine did a cover story on Katy Holmes when she was still in scientology, which she took issue with.

Legal papers exchanged over Star Magazine story about the E-meter are here. The lawyer wouldn’t touch my material, only Star Magazine’s cover characterization.

A comment by an engineer who actually read through it:

“I love how they fully admit there’s endorphin stimulation and then deny that’s like taking drugs. That is LITERALLY like taking drugs, because many drugs work because they stimulate endorphin release!”

PS: The reason there was a meter backlog to begin with was that the old meter man at Murcom that built Delta’s meter movement did his best to make our meter ‘better’… once I got it across to him that we did not want a ‘better’ meter, he made us hundreds of sloppy ones, and the E-Meter scarcity was solved!

PART2: Some Endorphins are stimulated by E-Meter use, (Morphine binds to same receptors as endorphins) so there is a morphine equivalent dose for exposure to the E-meter, it is likely subclinical, however there is no doubt, the science is there, that there is a time dependent morphine equivalent dose associated with use of the $cientology E-meter (blog coming soon) OLD page on this HERE

PART3: Because psychopaths have no stress response to wrongdoing, they can sail through “Security” tests that use either the Scientology E-meter or the Lie-detector. Their use therefore is useless for security, unless, what you are actually using them for is to find and utilize those same psychopaths, who will follow any direct order for which they will gain… without being troubled by having the conscience (and stress response) of a normal man to wrongdoing.

NOTES:
(1) These were the blue faced “Delta” meters around serial number 3100…that had meter movements produced by a meter movement manufacturer called Murcom who had a small factory on the south side of Rosecrans Blvd.

(4) I preformed a simple experiment and using a frequency generator and an actual Delta era E-meter movement, I drove the e-meter with an ac signal, with enough DC offset to hold the needle at midrange. The output of my laboratory frequency generator only went down to 8 Hz, however the amplitude was constant. What I noted was the lower I went the wider the needle started wagging, and dang if at 8 hz it did not resemble a floating needle. If I could have gone down to 4 or even 7 Hz I bet it would have looked “perfect”. I need to get a frequency divider and run this again.

From Blacks Law Dictionary:

Fraud: An intentional perversion of the truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing or to surrender a legal right; a false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words ot conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal inquiry; anything calculated to deceive, whether by a single act or combination, or by suppression of truth, or suggestion of what is false, whether it be by direct falsehood or innuendo, by speech or silence, word of mouth, or look or gesture; fraud comprises all acts, omissions, and concealments involving a branch of legal or equitable duty and resulting in damage to another.